When love is most nearly itself

"Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after."

"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
.........
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter."

-T. S. Eliot, "East Coker"


I've already started feeling a little better than I did when I wrote the last post. For most of my life I've thrived on change, even big change; sure I had a whole lot of trouble with the changes of the past two years, but anyone would. I think my double-fire-sign nature is starting to forge me into a stronger person. I can feel myself adjusting to this new lifestyle, one day at a time.

I felt really productive today for the first time since moving, which was awesome. I LOVE getting lost in my work, no matter what that work is. Today I started planning books to read for the GRE lit subject test (which contains nearly all books ever written, ever) and updated my resume template (a basic version for tweaking) quite a bit. It just felt good to be doing something that means I'm going somewhere.

On the other hand, I think it's also helping me to realize that I've been far too focused on where I'm going or where I've been and not focused enough on where I AM, a problem I fall into every so often. As soon as I stop thinking about this period in my life as some weird void between steps, I start feeling better and treating myself differently. For instance, I think I've been pushing myself way too hard to make friends. I made a few, which is really nice, but I before the move I started to get better at nurturing myself by harnessing my inner adult's ability to do so. And that is a very good step toward enjoying myself here. I'm not waiting to be happy until I make a bunch of friends or find a particular niche again; I can take care of myself right now, in this moment. "Ridiculous the sad waste time before and after," says Eliot, and he's a smart guy. That time doesn't matter, or matters only as it's a part of now. There's a time for everything, as Ecclesiastes says and Eliot echoes, a time for the nostalgia of "the evening with the photograph album" and a time for the actual experience. But love is itself in all times. Hence "Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter." The specifics of this moment don't matter, since the love that exists and composes what I care about in life exists regardless of time and space. It goes back to the last post, with people we love being not objects of our fulfillment; their happiness is an end in itself, as is their love. And that isn't affected by distance or time. Even if it diminishes over time, the memory of the feeling and one's care for people may not, and those memories themselves are feelings that help compose the present moment.

Wow, did not mean to get off on a philosophical rant, but I like using this space for things like that, it's fun and a good outlet. I should've kept a real journal years ago...I'm actually wondering how the public/private factor plays into this now, since this is the kind of stuff I'd be writing in a personal hand-written journal. I could just keep this blog for stuff I'm doing that people might wanna read about, but why force myself to be superficial? If I'm gonna write, I'm gonna write, and it might as well be organic.

Thinking about things related to these Eliot quotes got me away from thinking of another quote that happens to appear earlier in the same poem: "The dancers are all gone under the hill." "East Coker" is focused on the Earth element and has a lot to do with the role of death in time. I got a little wrapped up in the beautiful, simple finality of that line for a while, and it was making me focus a little too much on what's gone. But I guess that's why the rest of the poem exists. Eliot went on a spiritual journey to write these things. Very few things happen instantaneously, including acceptance of the present.

Since graduating, I've started reading the news every morning, meditating twice a day, completely cutting out fast food from my diet, walking more, reading for fun again, and writing a lot. I also took my first yoga class today, which was amazing (there were only four of us and the teacher played Iron and Wine and Regina Spektor the whole time). And none of this feels like I'm putting too much pressure on myself; they're all changes that happened naturally. The only pressure I've put on myself was to make a new social network immediately and so kind of recreate something like the life I had before. But now that I think of all these healthy new habits, not least of which is the fact that I'm spending more time with myself, maybe I really don't need to reach for the past this time. Maybe this is my chance to finally let go of all that desire and let right now just be right now...for now.

And if I do that, maybe I'll realize I haven't lost anything at all. This could be when love is most nearly itself.